bulk friends retrieval

Hi!

I just joined this community because I'm working on an application/applet which might interest some people, since it seems to be doing a fairly good job at impressing the few people who have seen it in motion.

I'm using the graphlayout software from TouchGraph to render friends lists graphically, including links within the 1st-tier friends group and hopefully the 2nd-tier if I can find a way to gather enough data and get a faster computer to develop on. :-p

One of my requirements is that when I click on another node, it should remove nodes on the graph which were only connected to the starting node, and add nodes for people who the new node is connected to. This will require friends list retrieval on the fly, which I'm currently doing using screen-scraping. Bad, I know. But I do cache, and currently the caching policy is "never expires". At some point I hope to change this but first I need a more streamlined way to gather data.

The guy who wrote the 6-degrees program tipped me off that there was a 'special' or secret interface for this, would someone be able to help me out?